"Not only the first woman, but the first human being, except myself."
"How nice!"
They had taken each other's hands; seated side by side, they leaned
against a curving elastic root that half supported, half encompassed,
them. The girl's capricious, fitful manner succumbed as before to the
near contact of her companion. Looking into her eyes, Low fell into a
sweet, selfish lover's monologue, descriptive of his past and present
feelings towards her, which she accepted with a heightened color, a
slight exchange of sentiment, and a strange curiosity. The sun had
painted their half-embraced silhouettes against the slanting tree-trunk,
and began to decline unnoticed; the ripple of the water mingling with
their whispers came as one sound to the listening ear; even their
eloquent silences were as deep, and, I wot, perhaps as dangerous, as the
darkened pool that filled so noiselessly a dozen yards away. So quiet
were they that the tremor of invading wings once or twice shook the
silence, or the quick scamper of frightened feet rustled the dead grass.
But in the midst of a prolonged stillness the young man sprang up so
suddenly that Nellie was still half clinging to his neck as he stood
erect. "Hush!" he whispered; "some one is near!"
He disengaged her anxious hands gently, leaped upon the slanting
tree-trunk, and running half-way up its incline with the agility of a
squirrel, stretched himself at full length upon it and listened.
To the impatient, inexplicably startled girl, it seemed an age before he
rejoined her.
"You are safe," he said; "he is going by the western trail towards
Indian Spring."
"Who is HE?" she asked, biting her lips with a poorly restrained gesture
of mortification and disappointment.
"Some stranger," replied Low.
"As long as he wasn't coming here, why did you give me such a fright?"
she said pettishly. "Are you nervous because a single wayfarer happens
to stray here?"
"It was no wayfarer, for he tried to keep near the trail," said Low. "He
was a stranger to the wood, for he lost his way every now and then. He
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